


The Astonishing Ant- (Wo)man

by rainbowagnes



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Bodhi's a recovering gambling addict and a great friend, Cassian is a SHIELD agent, Chirrut and Baze are the ORIGINAL superheroes of San Francisco, Gen, Hero's Journey, MCU AU, Modern AU, Post-Relationship, With some possible getting back together, ant-man au, but also a thief, cons and heists, hijinks and shenanigans, jyn is basically sara on orphan black, or like a combo of scott and hope, some fun with cameos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 00:51:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9854675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: Down-on-her luck thief Jyn needs a job, cash, and a chance to get back into her daughter and ex-husband's good graces.Soon she's caught up as the central figure of the heist of a life time to re-steal her father's greatest invention from his crooked business partner. To succeed, she's gonna need the help of two former marks, her anxiety-prone partner in crime, and her estranged ex.But when the plan goes south, Jyn might just have to take on her father's old superhero mantle and become a hero on her own terms.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Well, straight into the angst!
> 
> I promise Plot Things start to happen in the next chapter. Not even Jyn thinks she's actually gonna go straight this time. And exposition. That's a gonna happen too. 
> 
> And I have a place for pretty much every Rogue One character, but the easiest way to finesse in K2SO was as a formerly stray house cat named after cheese who hates Jyn. So. 
> 
> Theme song of this chapter (and honestly like most of the rest of them is "I Wanna Get Better" by Bleachers. 
> 
> "I didn't know I was lonely till I saw your face. I didn't know I was broken till I wanted to change."
> 
> Some admissions:  
> 1\. The science is probably all wrong and mumbo jumbo. If there's anything easily fixable, leave a comment.  
> 2\. Yes, I admit I did the greatest writing sin of all time, which is to use Google Translate. In my defense, I didn't have anyone who could help my translate it. If you see any mistakes, PLEASE leave a comment.

Copenhagen, 1989 

She's been hungry for half an hour, but it isn't enough to tear her mother away from the Very Important phono call in the office or her father from his rows of microscopes and whirring white machines.  


"Come ON, Papa. You said we could go get hot dogs. And waffles."  


He doesn't even look up, and her annoyance grows.

"In a minute, min skat. Could you pass me my notebook?" 

With an overdramatic sigh, she picked it up off of the coffee table and tossed it to him, hoping he'd ignore the patterns of ants and butterflies she'd drawn across his scientific notes in boredom.

Exasperatedly, she climbed on top of the lag bench and pulled herself up to his eye level. If she was going to have to wait in the most boring lab on earth, she might as well know what was going on. 

"What is it, Papa?" 

It looked like some tiny bits of glass, but she hoped it was more and that he hadn't truly gone off the deep end this time to study tiny pieces of a broken window. 

"The answer to the universe. The theory of everything." There's a tone of wonder in his voice that Jyn just doesn't understand. Her father is enamored with things that can't be seen with the eyes or counted with the hands, just represented with endless, mind-boggling strings on numbers on important looking papers. 

Jyn likes the more tactile side of science, the things she can smash with rocks and hold in her hands. She's figured out how to properly use a screw driver and spends plenty of hours breaking apart whatever junk people see fit to leave on the street: toasters, microwaves, motherboards, printers. Most of it's broken anyway, but she undoes it to the tiniest parts, trying to understand how everything fits together. 

"That helps a lot." 

"Do you understand what it is your mother and I do?"

"Uh, something with breaking rules. Of science." 

"Finding loopholes, Jyn. Taking the laws and theories of physics written down by great men and trying to find the mistakes. And then expiating those mistakes until I find the secrets of the universe." 

A lot of mumbo-jumbo, and Jyn still wants a hot dog. Sometimes she gets the impression her father's talking to air, or talking to her mainly to sort his own mind out. She doesn't mind all too much, because it makes her feel important being spoken to like an adult, like a scientific peer. 

"Ok, then." She nodes very officially, and her father laughs. "What's that, then?" 

She points to the crystals he's studying. There's some very familiar property to them that she can't quite explain, and when she reaches her hand out to him there's some kind of an involuntary pull. 

Galen quickly flicks her hand away.

"Kyber crystals. Not of this world. From some kind of galaxy far stranger than ours." 

"So- that's star dust?" 

"One way to put it, I guess. But from a very different kind of star. One with particles that don't behave according to any laws of physics that I know." 

"So this is stardust right here?" She reaches out to touch the crystals again, and this time he doesn't stop her, smiling because of her enthusiasm. "You work with stars right here?" 

"You have stars in you, Jyn." 

Her mother has finally finished with the endless phone call and leans over Jyn's right shoulder. 

"Really?" 

"We all do. Hold out your wrist." 

She does, and her mother lightly outlines the blue veins visible against her pale skin. 

"You see those blue lines, Jyn? Those are veins. You know what makes them blue?"

She doesn't. 

"Iron. One of the elements that make up the universe. And it can only be forged in the cores of dying stars." 

Jyn contemplates that for a minute. "So there's star dust in my blood?" 

"Exactly." Lyra kneels down until she's eye level with Jyn. "There might be some difficult things ahead of time. Alright, sweetie? I just want you to remember this: you are made of a dying star. You carry stardust in your blood. You understand?" 

This time, she does. 

"Alright, honey. If anything happens, I know you'll be strong and brave. Because you are made of star dust." 

Strong and brave. No one's ever called her that before, and it fills her with a warm, fuzzy feeling that warms her even as her father finally closes up the Bohr Institute for the night and they walk out into the freezing Danish night. Her mother undoes their bikes from their locks, and as Jyn sets hers up she can hear her mother whispering in tones she wrongly assumes are quiet enough. 

"I just spoke to Saw."

"And?" 

"And he thinks you should scrap the project and leave the country. Preferably the continent." 

He dismisses her, and they set off peddling home. At night the wet cobblestones have a kind of alien quality to them, and they bring to Jyn's mind the scales of a massive black dragon. Her father finally buys her the long awaited hot dog and hot chocolate from a stand in the square while her mother buys groceries and tsks disapprovingly. 

None of the Ersos are ready from the man who waits at their door.

"Bail?" Lyra's mouth drops open, and the first thought in Jyn's mouth is that he looks like a wizard from one of the fairytales her father reads to her, with his long dark trench coat flapping in the wind. 

"I came to ask again about requisitioning your brilliant work for use of SHIELD."

"No. Absolutely not. What Lyra and I have found- it's too dangerous." 

"And not so dangerous you don't both use it." 

A long moment of silence, and Jyn realizes how cold she is. Neither of her parents are even noticing her right now, though. 

"There's a difference between two self-destructive scientists using it for their own discoveries, and mass producing tech we don't even understand for causes we aren't even told about. And how do I know that if SHIELD gets it, HYDRA doesn't get it as well."

"You refer to youselves as self-destructive, and yet you have a daughter to take care of. She looks like you, Lyra, but she reminds me of my own." 

"We have made provisions that she will be safe, under any circumstances." 

"You may have to use them. What I'm saying is, your research has let the genie out of a bottle it can never be put back in. As soon as it was in writing, all of these "loopholes," as you call them, exist. The best you can do is decide when and how it gets out there." 

"Or we decide it does not get "out there" at all." Her father is angrier than anytime Jyn has ever seen him. 

"I am not threatening you, just informing you of the possibilities. Turn over the research to SHIELD, and you and your family live in American comfort. And you might see any youthful "transgressions" you might have had with HYDRA erased." 

"No. Absolutely not."

"Then you have made the choice for yourselves. I warn you, I doubt Orson will be generous. Leave the country. Please. Burn the lab and the research, but leave. Take your daughter with you. Maybe one day she and Leia will be friends. But listen to me as a friends- there are people who'd see all of you die for what you have uncovered." 

Her mother thanks the man, and he walks back out into the rain. A week later, Jyn is woken up with a bag packed in the middle of the night, and they leave on the midnight train to Belgium before even her father's business parter knows. 

\------o0o----------

San Francisco, 2017

The hole-in-the-wall taqueria is still there, but the bodega on the corner has been replaced by a vape shop and the diner next door has sign up horrifically offering "Artisanal, Hand Crafted Toasted Flatbreads." 

Jyn pictures signs like that as beacons calling out to hordes of gringo yuppies to move in and jack up the rent. Six months in prison, and it feels like The Mission's undergone some kind of unwanted, unprescribed transformation that sends her reeling as she walks down it's streets. But there's still it's familiar bright backbone. The newsstands selling the stacks of bilingual newspapers Lyra was just starting to be able to sound out. The murals, almost blindingly bright in the neighborhoods bizarrely sunny microclimate, and the park where Jyn used to walk Lyra after school. 

For a second, Jyn wonders if they could try calling up the Avengers. But they seem to deal with the punch-able aspects of urban problems. Aliens and killer robots? That'll interest them. Rising rent costs and gentrification? Tony Stark would probably buy in whole heartedly and raze the place to the ground. 

The building waits for her across the street. Neatly tended older orange brick with flower boxes and flags hanging from the windows. Her eyes drift involuntarily to a second story window where a distinctive green, red and white flag flutters in the breeze next to some window boxes who's flowers look like they've received a bit to much loving care. 

Luckily, the door to the building's passcode hasn't changed. It swings open easily, and Jyn notices a pink bike with streamers hanging from it's handles parked in the entryway. Maybe it's Lyra's. It's probably Lyra's. With a pang Jyn wonders if she's started to practice without training wheels, if she's conquered her fear of riding down the city's hellish hills. 

She almost hesitates outside the apartment door. Almost. If she were a better person, she'd walk away right now. Come back with a job and a pay check and at least some kind of balance. Maybe never come back.

She isn't a better person. 

She raps neatly on the door and immidately hears the patter of light feet running towards the door. 

"Whooooo is it?" After half a second, Lyra adds "Quiiiiiien Es?"

"Hey, peanut." She lines up her eyes with the keyhole, green eye meeting dark brown one.

"Mama!" Jyn hears the thump of Lyra jumping down from the chair and the door swings open. She thought she was ready for the shock of seeing her daughter again after six months behind bars. She isn't. Lyra's gotten at least two inches taller. Her braids have gotten longer, and darker at the roots, and it's the lack of resemblance between her and her mother has become even more abundantly obvious. 

Lyra immedately wraps her arms around Jyn, pulling her into an almost viselike hug. 

"I missed you so much, mama."

"I did too, peanut." 

"Don't ever leave again." 

"I plan on sticking around." 

"Lyra! What did we talk about with strangers?" Cassian's voice comes from inside the apartment.

"But it's mama. And she isn't even that strange." 

"What?" He just sounds mainly confused.

"MAMA'S HOME!" 

"Jyn?" 

Jyn looks up her burying her face in Lyra's dark hair. Cassian's standing in the entryway, looking like he's seen a ghost. Jyn's never been great with facial expressions, but even she can see the conflicting emotions on his face. Burning anger, sadness, irritation, but something like relief in there as well. Like hope, if she where the optimistic type. 

"Hey." 

"Jyn. Jyn, you're back." 

"Yep." She feels conspicuously out of place in the entry way of their apartment, with it's slightly chaotic but overall clean domesticity. She wishes she'd had a chance to take a shower, or put on something separate from the grimy street clothes she was arrested in last September. She can already the street grime that's rubbed off on Lyra's immaculate uniform. 

Cassian places his hands firmly over Lyra's ears, ignoring her attempts to brush them off. 

"What the fuck where you thinking?" Not enough, she wants to say, but she can't. So she stands still, rooted at the doorway, feeling deep rooted sense of shame that's been her constant companion for the last six months (and if she'd being honest, long before that) well up inside her.

"Forgery of government documents. Aggravated assault. Possession with stolen property. Resisting arrest." 

Another long pause. The silence ways heavy between them. 

"Why, Jyn? Why?" 

She can't answer. "One last job?" 

"It's been "one last job" six times. One last job never pans out. You're addicted to it, Jyn." 

She probably is. But this time- this time there isn't a last job. There's just a job, which will hopefully be legal. Which she needs to find, pronto. 

"Why are you back, Jyn?" 

"Because of you two." 

"Really? We weren't enough to keep you here before. What's changed?" 

"I have." 

"You've told me that twice. You've told Lyra that twice, and she still actively believes that. She's gonna stop believing you some day. Smart kid. Pray it won't be soon." 

He lifts his hands off of Lyra's ears, and she resumes her usual chatter. After six months away, it's God's music to Jyn's ears. 

"Can you stay for dinner, Mama?"

As soon as Lyra says it, Jyn knows it's going to happen. Cassian can't deny his daughter anything. It's part of how she's walked in and out of their lives far more than she should have been able to, because Cassian can't see the look on Lyra's face and shut the door on her. 

"Sure, duckling." She sees Cassian out of the corner of her eye. "One night," he mouths silently, and she gives him a thumbs up in response. 

They end up going back out of the flat for dinner. The temperature feels like it's plummeted about twenty degrees while she was inside, and Jyn shivers in the February cold. 

"Put this on." Cassian starts to shrug off his massive blue parka, and Jyn tries to stop him. 

"Cassian, I'm fine."

"Can't have hospitalized for hypothermia on your first day out." 

The heavy warmth of the parka falls on her and she decides to stop arguing. The whole thing would be easier if she could truly be angry with Cassian about anything. And truth be told, there are plenty of things for her to be angry with him about. The still obscure details of his pre-Fulcrum, pre- mission Erso life. The half-truths he's told over the years, and the way he doesn't seem to question- or more importantly, act against- anything SHIELD tells him to do. 

But she can't be angry with him over the way he treats her, or the situation with Lyra. For those things, she has only herself to blame. 

They end up at a burrito joint Jyn dimly remembers going to years ago, with cheerful music blasted over the loudspeaker and streamers hanging from the ceiling. Lyra pushes Jyn into the booth first, slides in, and pulls her father in after so that the three of them are locked in elbows-to-elbows. A waitress takes there orders.

Lyra pulls an action figure out of her pocket, a cat-suit clad woman with flowing hair and guns ablazing. 

"This one's my favorite. She and Queso watch over everyone else when we leave home?" 

"You still have Queso, then?" It's a cruel hope, but for a second Jyn thinks of the endless sob stories she hears of cats being run over or eating rat poison and wonders how Queso can't be one of them. "Why didn't he meet me at the door like he normally does?"

"He's too smart to think you're a threat, and he doesn't like you enough to come meet you." 

"He is smart that way." Almost too smart, for a cat. Cassian found him through some black-booked SHIELD operation, and Jyn's still not sure he isn't secretly a genetically engineered beast or murder robot or something. She also isn't entirely sure why Lyra decided to name him after cheese, given he's black and prone to scratching strangers. 

She picks up the Black Widow figurine. Someone's gone over the eyes and hair with a brown sharpie. 

"What's this?" 

"I wanted her to look like me." 

On the other side of Lyra, Cassian grunts. "Not a lot of Latinas on the Avengers roster." 

"But Black Widow is the best. And she always does her science homework and the recycling and is never, ever rude to Mrs. Cardenas down the hall." She has a familiar quirk to her mouth as she says it with a smile. "Right, papa?" 

"Right."

Their food comes. Inevitably, Lyra ordered a full sized carne asada burrito and Jyn ordered an empty plate. Also inevitably, Jyn eats about three quarters of it. It's the first proper food she's had since the sandwich she bout at the seven eleven right after being let off the prison bus. She scarfs down most of it before looking up, almost embarrassedly. Cassian slides her the still foil-wrapped half of his burrito. 

"Take it. For later."

This time, when they get back to the flat, Queso is waiting to greet them by trying to stick his claws in Jyn's leg.

"Lyra!" Cassian's voice called out from the kitchen. "Mañana de escuela! Es hora de ir a la cams!" 

"Pero papa, mama acaba de regresar."

"Now! She'll be back in a bit." 

With a huff, Lyra walks into the back rooms of the flat. Within the minute, Jyn can hear the taps of the bath running. 

Cassian's waiting for her in the kitchen. 

"The Spanish thing isn't fair." The moment she says it, she wishes she hadn't. There's a lot of things Jyn Erso is, but fair to her family isn't one of them. And nothing stings worse than being a hypocrite. 

"Really? You want to talk to me about fair? Six months ago I get a call, middle of the night, that you've been arrested for stealing." 

"Possession of stolen property. They couldn't actually prove I did it." 

"You where found outside the de Young in a Maserati with three Diego Riveras in the back seat." 

"Wrong place, wrong time. I didn't actually take them." 

"I don't actually care, Jyn." And she knows she knows he means it with a bone-deep understanding. "You've been in and out of her life so much she doesn't know what having you actually in her life feels like." 

"Cassian. Cassian, I'm trying."

"Maybe your trying isn't good enough. Look, Jyn, you can mess up your own life. And I don't care anymore if you mess up mine. But don't do that to Lyra." 

"So what do you want me to do?" 

"Find a legal job. Stick around the city for a few months so I know you won't just drop off the face of the earth again." 

"Legal job? Like shooting people for SHIELD?" 

"It's a desk job." 

"Desk jobs don't pay that well. And you're in way to good shape to be sitting typing all day." 

"Jyn . . ." 

"If I had to guess, I'd say SHIELD dug up your fantastic Afghanistan record and now to kill the bad guys for them." 

There's a long moment of silence between them. Jyn's reminded intensely of being questioned before a judge. Although this time, the stakes are infinitely higher. 

"Look, I don't care what you do, as long as it makes money." 

"Maybe that was part of the problem to begin with." 

"But just don't die on Lyra. She needs one parent who isn't a screw up." 

"Jyn. Jyn, whatever you may think of me, I want you back here in her life. I just want to know that you'll actually stick around before I let you back in for good."

She nodds. It's a fair ultimatum. 

"Is it alright if I go check on her, before I leave?" 

"Of course."

Lyra is already passed out on her bed, with Queso takes careful watch over her from the window. Her room's changed since Jyn was last here, the stuffed toys replacing themselves with library books. Black Widow stands vigilant on a shelf over the other toy avengers. She has a blue gel ant farm set up on a desk as well. 

Her light's still on, and at first Jyn thinks it's a ward against the dark until she sees the book wedged underneath her. So Lyra fell asleep reading. Jyn carefully tries to pull the book out from under Lyra, feeling her hot breath and the messy spray of her straight hair as she does.

"I'll be back, duckling. I promise." 

Jyn looks at the title of the book. Amazing Ants. So some childhood obsessions really do run in families. 

Scotch-taped in a place of honor on the door is a massive drawing of what looks like a lopsided Thanksgiving turkey holding a green worm. It throws Jyn for a loop until she reads the shaky letters written beneath in green and red marker: My Kulcher. 

She hasn't cried in years. For some unexplained reason, this brings out the waterworks. 

She sits on the edge of the bed for a few minutes, trying to resteady herself, running her fingers through the soft mess of Lyra's hair. Cassian's right. She can screw up her own life, even screw up his, but she can't screw up Lyra's. She isn't leaving forever. She'll come back. She'll come back with a nice seventy-two grand a year job as an electrical engineer and she'll buy the apartment upstairs and this time, she'll be an Erso that sticks around when things go bad.

She's had enough practice at it she can even lie to herself. 

The door of the bedroom opens a sliver. 

"No need to kick me out, I was about to leave." She pulls herself up quickly, trying to wiper her eyes with the back of her hand. She almost physically knocks into Cassian on her way out. 

He tries to embrace her as she walks out, wrap his arms around her, and for half a second, she almost lets him. But almost immediately she shakes him off. 

"Jyn, I th-" 

"I'm leaving." She's already almost at the door, trying to undo the knots she's idiotically made of her shoe laces.

"Jyn, what I was trying to say is, I was being unreasonable." 

"No, you weren't. You where being perfectly fucking reasonable. I need to get out, get a job, get an apartment, not get arrested." 

"Jyn- while you are doing that, I still think it would be good if you . . . came over? Sunday evenings, maybe? Help Lyra with her homework. She doesn't listen to me about maths." 

She looks back into the apartment, trying to soak up every detail like the thief she is, like she'll never see it again. The grumpy black cat watching the window and the scattering of legos on the carpet and the upright plasticine figure of Natasha Romanov standing vigilant. Cassian's offer is tempting, and she feels a grip coming from this place, a rising current threatening to pull her under. A current she'll fight and come up breathless and sputtering and ready to run from again. 

No. She's accepted this offer before, this kind of compromise, and reneged on her end of the deal.

This time, she's going to be better. 

So she shakes her head and closes the apartment door with a click and a soft goodnight. It's as she's walking down the stairs into the night- now icy and swirling with needle-like winds- that it hits her that it's always been her that closes the door. 


End file.
